USS Bunker Hill (CV-17) on 11 May 1945: two kamikazes in thirty seconds

USS Bunker Hill (CV-17) burning after two kamikaze aircraft struck her within about 30 seconds on 11 May 1945, while she was flagship of Vice Adm. Marc Mitscher’s Task Force 58 off Okinawa. Photo: U.S. Navy, NARA 80-G-274266, Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Special Units · Kamikaze, 1944–1945

USS Bunker Hill on 11 May 1945

Two Zeros, two 250-kg bombs and a flight deck full of fuelled aircraft: the deadliest kamikaze attack of the war, and the two young men who made it.

At a few minutes past ten on the morning of 11 May 1945, the fleet carrier USS Bunker Hill (CV-17) was steaming off Okinawa as flagship of Vice Adm. Marc A. Mitscher’s Task Force 58. About 25 of her aircraft were aloft and 34 more were spotted on the after flight deck, armed, fuelled and manned for launch. Out of the low clouds came a Zero fighter. It released a bomb, crashed among the parked aircraft and set them ablaze. About 30 seconds later a second Zero dived through the gunfire and struck the base of the island; its bomb exploded in a pilots’ ready room. Within minutes the carrier was burning from end to end.

The ship survived, saved by her captain’s handling, her engineers and her damage-control parties, and by the ships that came alongside. But the human cost was the heaviest of any kamikaze attack of the war: 346 men killed, 43 missing and 264 wounded by the Navy’s count at the time, and 396 dead in the Naval History and Heritage Command’s later reckoning. The two attackers were identified long afterwards as Ens. Yasunori Seizō and Ens. Ogawa Kiyoshi of the 7th Shōwa Special Attack Unit, flying from Kanoya in southern Kyushu. Ogawa’s last letter survives.

This page sets out the attack from the Navy’s record, the arithmetic of the dead, and the story of the Japanese airmen, including how Ogawa’s name tag and letters came home. The ship is set in the context of the other carriers hit off Okinawa in Chapter 6; the pilots and their letters in Chapter 3.

A carrier of the fast carrier force

Bunker Hill was launched at the Fore River yard of Bethlehem Steel in Quincy, Massachusetts, on 7 December 1942, the first anniversary of Pearl Harbor, and commissioned on 24 May 1943 under Capt. J. J. Ballentine. She joined the Pacific Fleet that autumn and fought in nearly every fast carrier operation from then on: the Rabaul strike, the Gilberts, Kavieng, the Marshalls and Truk, Hollandia and the Marianas. In the Battle of the Philippine Sea on 19 June 1944 a Japanese bomb near-missed her, killing two men and wounding more than 80. In 1945 she supported the landings at Iwo Jima and Okinawa, and on 7 April her aircraft helped sink the battleship Yamato. She earned 11 battle stars and a Presidential Unit Citation for the period from November 1943 to the day she was struck.

In May 1945 she was Mitscher’s flagship. The admiral and his staff, under his chief of staff Commodore Arleigh A. Burke, worked in the flag plot and flag office in her island. Task Force 58 was then in its seventh week off Okinawa, launching strikes against the island and the Kyushu airfields and absorbing the Kikusui attacks that came south from them.

11 May: the first plane

The sixth Kikusui attack, on 10–11 May, sent some 150 special attack aircraft south from Kyushu, 70 navy and 80 army by Steven Zaloga’s count. Most fell on the picket destroyers, among them Hugh W. Hadley and Evans on Radar Picket Station No. 15, both crippled but saved. A few navy Zeros of the 7th Shōwa unit from Kanoya, flying low and using the clouds, reached the carriers.

At about 10:04 Maj. James E. Swett, a Marine ace and Medal of Honor recipient returning from a close-support mission, saw a Japanese plane diving out of the clouds and radioed a warning; it was too late. The first Zero, flown by Ens. Yasunori Seizō, strafed the flight deck and released a bomb of about 550 pounds (250 kg) just before it struck. The aircraft bounced off the deck and slid through the parked planes, starting fires among them. The bomb passed through the flight deck and hangar and exploded about 20 feet outside the port side; its fragments caused many casualties, and fuelled aircraft in the hangar caught fire.

The second plane

About 30 seconds later the second Zero, flown by Ens. Ogawa Kiyoshi, came in under heavy fire from every gun that could bear and kept coming. It crashed at the base of the island. Its bomb exploded in a ready room full of pilots: Fighting Squadron 84 (VF-84) lost 19 officers and three enlisted men there, and other squadrons also lost heavily. A wing and the engine of the aircraft smashed into the flag office. Mitscher’s staff flight surgeon, Capt. Raymond W. Hege, his flag secretary, Lt. Cmdr. Charles Steel, and Lt. Cmdr. Frank Quady, assistant to the staff operations officer, were killed with 11 enlisted men. Burke ordered everyone out of the flag plot. Mitscher’s cabin and his belongings burned.

A third aircraft, a Judy dive bomber, was shot down at close range without further damage. By then the flight deck and hangar were full of burning aircraft, fuel and ammunition, and smoke poured into the compartments below.

Saving the ship

Capt. George A. Seitz’s answer to the flight-deck fire was to turn hard, about 70 degrees, so that the ship’s heel threw burning gasoline and wreckage over the side. It worked on the flight deck; the hangar fires were harder. At one point Seitz ordered men aft to abandon ship, but in the noise and confusion many did not hear the order, and the fight went on. The light cruiser Wilkes-Barre, under Capt. Robert L. Porter Jr., came alongside the starboard quarter, passed hoses and firefighting gear, took off wounded and sheltered men trapped aft; several destroyers also came alongside.

Below decks, the chief engineer, Lt. Cmdr. Joseph R. Carmichael Jr., kept his men at their posts in the smoke so that the boilers stayed lit and pressure held in the fire mains. Of about 500 men in the engineering spaces, 125 became casualties. Mitscher handed tactical command of Task Force 58 temporarily to Rear Adm. Frederick Sherman in Essex, and at 16:20, once the fires were under control, transferred with his surviving staff to Enterprise. Three days later, on 14 May, a kamikaze knocked Enterprise out of the war as well, and Mitscher had to move his flag again.

Counting the dead

How many men died on 11 May depends on what is counted and when. The Navy’s figures at the time, repeated in the Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, were 346 killed, 43 missing and 264 wounded: 389 dead and missing together. A National Archives caption of 1945 gives 372 dead and 264 wounded. The Naval History and Heritage Command’s H-Gram 048-1 gives a total of 396 dead, counting the 43 missing who were never found and 13 wounded men who died aboard Wilkes-Barre, and more than 260 wounded, many of them badly burned. By any count it was the deadliest single kamikaze attack of the war; the escort carrier Bismarck Sea, sunk off Iwo Jima on 21 February 1945, came next with 318 dead.

The two airmen

The attackers were young reserve officers of the navy’s 7th Shōwa Special Attack Unit, flying Zeros from Kanoya, the navy’s main special attack base, under Vice Adm. Ugaki Matome’s 5th Air Fleet. Ens. Yasunori Seizō flew the first aircraft. Ens. Ogawa Kiyoshi, the pilot of the second, was 22. He came from Gunma Prefecture and had studied liberal arts at Waseda University in Tokyo until, in the autumn of 1943, the government ended draft deferments for humanities students. He entered the navy’s 14th class of flight reserve students, trained at Takeyama near Yokosuka and at Tsuchiura and Yatabe in Ibaraki Prefecture, and was assigned to a special attack unit at Kanoya.

Before his sortie Ogawa wrote to his parents. Bill Gordon’s translation includes these lines:

Last letter · Kanoya, May 1945

“I will go smiling, both on the day of my sortie and forever.”

— Ens. Ogawa Kiyoshi, 7th Shōwa Special Attack Unit, to his parents; trans. Bill Gordon, via kamikazeimages.net

Last letter · Kanoya, May 1945

“Father and Mother, please be glad for me.”

— Ens. Ogawa Kiyoshi, to his parents; trans. Bill Gordon

How Ogawa came to be identified is itself a story of the record. A Bunker Hill crewman, Robert Schock, took from the wreckage of the second aircraft a name tag bearing part of a name, two sheets of a letter, a broken aviator’s watch and two photographs. He kept them for the rest of his life. After his death his grandson, Dax Berg, found them in a box. The partial name on the tag, read with the date and time of the attack, identified the pilot as Ogawa. In March 2001 Ogawa’s grandniece and her mother travelled to San Francisco and received the items from Berg. The letters he carried, and his last letter to his parents, are contemporary documents; the identification of the two pilots rests on Japanese unit records read against the American account of the attack.

Repair, and the end of the ship

Bunker Hill reached Ulithi under her own power and went on by way of Pearl Harbor to the Puget Sound Navy Yard at Bremerton, Washington. Her repairs were finished as the war ended, and from September 1945 to January 1946 she carried veterans home in Operation Magic Carpet. She was placed out of commission in reserve at Bremerton on 9 January 1947 and never served again as a carrier. In the 1960s she was used for shock testing, and in 1973 she was sold for scrap.

The book that brought the attack and its Japanese side to a wide American audience was Maxwell Taylor Kennedy’s Danger’s Hour: The Story of the USS Bunker Hill and the Kamikaze Pilot Who Crippled Her (2008).